How to Find Better Safety Jobs (Without Guessing)

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Talk to People in the Field

The safety community is smaller than you think.

Reach out on:

• LinkedIn safety groups
• Talk to the safety person at you or your friends company
• ASSP chapters
• Bigger construction project site contacts
• Safety consultation at a nearby OSHA office
• Instructors at a local OSHA Education Center
• Industry events
• Join the safety committee

Ask simple questions:

• "What’s it really like working at that company?"
• "Does leadership listen to safety?"

You’ll get honest answers.

Public records, news stories, and industry chatter tell you a lot.

I would always see if they had any OSHA inspections motivating the hire.

You can look up any company to see their inspections. Here is the link:

https://www.osha.gov/ords/imis/establishment.html

One incident can, but doesn’t usually define a company. Patterns do.

Interviews go both ways.

Ask:

• "What safety improvements have been made in the last year?"
• "How do supervisors participate in safety?"
• "What does success look like after one year in this role?"

If answers are vague, that’s information.

If possible, talk to supervisors or managers you’ll support. Your daily experience depends on them more than anyone else.

If you’re just getting started, here’s something nobody tells you early enough:

Your first job might not be your best job.

And that’s okay.

Early in your career, focus on:

• Learning how work actually gets done
• Building credibility with workers
• Understanding risk beyond regulations
• Listening more than talking

If you are trying to get a safety job and you have not had one before, invest in yourself to show your interest and skills. There a lots of safety training sites online to take a 10 Hour OSHA Construction or General Industry course. A 30 Hour is even better, and it is still less that a few hundred dollars. You can read each of the pages on this site. If you do, you will learn quite a bit about safety, and watch all the videos too.

Consider taking a course at your community college or from an OSHA Education Center. Maybe start with an OSHA 510 or OSHA 511. I used to teach them and I think they are a good way to learn the starndards.

https://www.osha.gov/otiec/text

If your work has a safety committee, join it. Volunteer to help in an area you do not have to. “Do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”  Cathy Bolger 

The safety people who succeed long-term are the ones who learned operations first and moved into safety at the same company.

Also, don’t chase titles too early. Experience beats titles every time. For me, it was always more about money than titles, but titles can get more money at the next job, so work out what you can.

If you’ve been doing this a while, burnout is real.

Common reasons experienced safety people leave jobs:

• No leadership support
• Constant firefighting
• Unrealistic expectations
• Being excluded from decisions

Before jumping ship, ask yourself:

• Do I need a new company, or just a new environment?
• Am I solving the same problems repeatedly?
• Am I still learning?
• Can I get a better title or pay, then use that for leverage

Sometimes the best move isn’t up, it’s sideways into a better culture.

Yes, pay matters. A higher salary doesn’t compensate for a toxic environment. You may put up with it, but it is rough.

The highest-paying safety jobs can come with:

• Higher stress
• Travel demands
• Crisis management expectations

But you have to determine what you will put up with.

The best jobs balance compensation with influence, respect, and sustainability. It can be a good job, you just need to be able to get your work done and figure out how to add value.

If you dread opening your texts and emails day and night, the salary math stops working pretty quickly.

The best safety jobs usually feel like this:

• People call you before problems happen
• Leaders ask for your input early
• Workers trust you enough to tell the truth
• You spend more time improving systems than reacting to incidents
• You feel like you have purpose and what you do matters

You’re not fighting the organization,  you’re helping it get better.

That’s the goal, improve yourself and the organization and have a positive influnce on reducing incidents and injuries and the people you work with.

A lot of safety professionals never seriously consider insurance risk control roles, and that’s a mistake.

Risk control or loss control positions, typically with insurance carriers or brokers, can be some of the most balanced jobs, bet paying in the safety field.

• You see multiple companies and industries instead of one environment
• Less internal politics
• Focus on prevention and improvement rather than enforcement
• Strong exposure to management-level decision making

Many experienced safety professionals move into these roles later in their careers because the pace is more sustainable while still being technically challenging. You can get in early, but you will likely be hussling around a lot to complete assessments. It's OK, they will train you and you will learn alot.

You’ll spend more time advising than implementing. Sometimes you make recommendations and never see the outcome. If you need direct control over change, this can feel frustrating.

But if you enjoy analyzing risk, coaching leadership, and influencing without authority, risk control can be one of the better long-term safety careers.

Government safety roles, federal, state, municipal, or regulatory, offer a very different experience from private industry.

• Generally strong job stability
• Predictable schedules
• Clear processes and expectations
• Opportunity to influence safety at a broader level

For many professionals, especially later in their careers or during life transitions, this stability is a major benefit.

Change often moves slower. Resources can be limited. Innovation sometimes takes patience.

If you’re coming from fast-paced construction or manufacturing, the adjustment can feel significant at first.

That said, government roles can be incredibly rewarding if you value consistency, public impact, and long-term influence over rapid operational change.

Most safety professionals spend a lot of time preparing to answer interview questions. Fewer spend enough time evaluating the company that’s interviewing them.

After enough years in the field, you start to recognize patterns that usually lead to frustration, burnout, or short stays.

Here are some common interview warning signs:

If the conversation focuses only on lowering incident rates or "keeping OSHA away," that usually means the organization cares more about appearances than improvement.

If they expect you to "fix safety" in a few months, culture problems already exist and leadership may not understand their role in solving them.

If you never meet supervisors or operational leaders, there’s a good chance safety operates in isolation.

Pay attention when questions about staffing, budget, or authority get unclear answers. Good companies are transparent about how safety works.

Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it means expectations were unrealistic. Ask what specifically didn’t work.

Remember, interviews go both ways. A good safety job should feel like a partnership from the beginning, not a rescue mission.